Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Tim Leunig is a fucking idiot

He thinks everyone in "failed regeneration towns" in the North should relocate to the South East. I think this is utter bullshit. The sheer inhumanity of this guy's reasoning cannot be adequately vilified. Treating people as if they have no culture, no connection with their environment and community. This is the worst sort of centralised, rule-by-diktat crap. "You aren't being productive where you are, so you should move your family and entire existence to this grotty little, purpose-built estate of poor-quality, mass produced 'workers quarters' to increase your productivity for the Motherland!"

Sound familiar?

And they say that the Left has come full circle to become the new neoliberal harcore! Here we have a Liberal Democrat (surely a closet Tory?) writing for the Tory's favourite thinktank, advocating the organisation of the population into Stalinist production centres.

Seriously, what the fuck?

Addition:

A certain person in the comments can't tell when I'm laying out an argument so I've made it really simple and gone through the summary of Leunig's report and highlighted the most glaringly obvious insanities and logical disconnects. Here we go:

"We need to accept above all that we cannot guarantee to regenerate every town and every city in Britain that has fallen behind. Just as we can't buck the market, so we can’t buck economic geography either. "

Its funny that this is the opening gambit because the rest of the document appears to argue for policies that do exacty that.

"Places that enjoyed the conditions for creating wealth in the coal-powered 19th-century often do not do so today.""Luck has also played its part: in 1900 London had finance and Manchester had cotton. Finance has since prospered and cotton collapsed, reinforcing geographical changes."

It is obscene that Leunig cites historical geographical changes and ignores the potential for similar factors to influence future prosperity. Certain settlements in this country have been in steady decline for decades or even centuries. This doesn’t mean that those places should be gutted. People are still free to live in such places even if they an economic drain on the rest of the country. Expecting every single settlement to conform to some economic success model smacks of authoritarianism. Freedom includes the freedom to fail. In any society you will have successes and failures on a given scale of success and launching pogroms against the failures is insane and obscene. You must accept that people can and will fail in life and societies and communities are no different. It is the function of society to carry such failed communities along and support them for the sake of the wider society, just as the success stories are not left to consume their extreme wealth by themselves, but instead are forced to redistribute their wealth amongst the wider community. It also doesn't mean that such failed examples are devoid of value. They may still excel in certain aspects of their existence, aesthetically, eccentrically, intellectually, socially, culturally.

"There is no realistic prospect that our regeneration towns and cities can converge with London and the South East."

Why would we want them to? What sort of fuckstick imagines for one second that every settlement in the entire country can be managed to some sort of economic parity where they are all equally productive? Reality check, motherfucker!

"There are over 2,500 hectares of industrial land in London alone, and 10,000 hectares in London and the South East together. If only half of it were used for housing, it would create £25 billion in value and allow half a million people to move to an area that offers much better prospects than where they live now."

The South East is already overpopulated. The infrastructure and ecosystem services can barely sustain the existing population, let alone another million people. Water abstraction levels are 10 per cent higher than the water supply available in the South East. Without significant investment an influx of migrants will rapidly push services to breaking point. The incumbent communities will view the migrants with resentment and allocate blame for compromising services to them. It will be a fucking nightmare. The future holds few absolute certainties but three of them are resource depletion, climate change and population growth. These three factors suggest that food prices will rise continuously in the future as they are now. The population densities living in London will soon be unsustainable if food prices continue to rise as people resort to seeking their own land to produce groceries from in order to maintain a reasonable standard of living.

Edit log:

Yeah, I made some changes to this because I'd misrepresented the first quote. Better now. He's still a fucking idiot.

10 comments:

Leunig and co are right - he is telling why this decline will continue as the shift of trade and the type of trade is based on what the South has to offer- just read the report!I am so dissapointed that everybody wants to continue hidding behind regeneration policies. Leunig and co's remit was "What is the faster way of increasing the income of the poor people up north?" and the fastest and best way is "Move!". This sort of move is habitual in the US - just look at the detroit rustbelt and the sunshine states. I just think a national debate is needed over priorites, and if priorities are to reduce income inequalities then Leuning and co's ideas make danm good sence!

"I just think a national debate is needed over priorites, and if priorities are to reduce income inequalities then Leuning and co's ideas make danm good sence [sic]"

Plus I don't hold US society as any sort of model to be emulated, thank you very fucking much.

James, fair enough. That doesn't make him any less of an idiot for spouting such sociopathic rot. His is a typical example of a bean counter's conclusion. It completely ignores the human aspect of a community and disregards anything that can't have a price tag neatly affixed. Its bullshit.

Tim was my teacher at LSE as well, friends from other courses would come to his lecture just for the enjoyment of it! He is NOT saying that people MUST move, but they should if wealth is their primar aim. I remember in a 1st year course he told us why he hadn't moved to the US, because of his family. He realises that some people do not WANT to move, and should not be forced to, but that they should be able to.

Yes it is a bean counter's conclusion, but we need this as a policy starting point. Once other factors are accounted for, such as community, perhaps the polic may change. Read Richard Layard on 'Happiness' which takes an economists' view on the value of goods which we cannot market.

"He realises that some people do not WANT to move, and should not be forced to, but that they should be able to."

So, what is stopping intranational economic migration right now? Do enlighten me because I wasn't aware of any law forbidding people from the North looking for work down South.

". . . we need this as a policy starting point

This is clearly not a "policy starting point" it is a complete, neatly wrapped policy from a neoconservative think tank branded "the largest, but also the most influential think tank on the right" by the Daily Torygraph. The fact that even the Tories baulked at it is telling (i.e. damning).

Take it you completely missed the part in the report that suggested central government's regeneration cash be diverted to fund local authorities directly so that money can actually be spent on local priorities for local people. So local councils would be better funded without wasting money on art centres and this type of thing - think how much better Sunderland would be if the £1bn spent on regeneration there over ten years could have been put into improvements in education, transport, policing, and local leisure provision.

Kevin: That's a really good point and its the one bit that I agree with. Decentralisation is heavily evidenced to produce better value for money than centralised diktat. (I kind of alluded to this in my post.)

I read that and made a mental note to make a statement affirming my feeling. Then I got caught up ranting at James and forgot. My bad.

People are free to stay in the North as long as they don't expect their existence to be subsidised by the national taxpayer. Less moaning would be nice too.

The SE is not overcrowded, there is plenty of land and resources to grow upon. Bad gov policy restricts growth and should be changed.

Brother Leunig is correct. There is no intrinsic connection between the volk and the land (ergo why migration is such a fillip for prosperity). Lets not throw good money after bad trying to fight the inexorable forces of economic geography. The NE would do very nicely as a nature reserve. Existing trainlines can transport visitors from the SE.

about me

I'm actually pretty ugly and my penis is smaller than the Caucasian average. At 31 years of age I still can't grow a proper beard. I used to blog but I've pretty much given up now. You can find me on Twitter these days where I take pleasure in staring misanthropy in the face and waiting to see who blinks first.